The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry Read Free Book Online

Christian. Now he laughs the loudest. A Christian!
     
    The captain makes Galveston the centre of their journeys so Galveston becomes as familiar to him as a district of Ireland. He comes to understand all the natures of the sea creatures captured by the famous fishermen of Galveston, in their boats rusty but glamorous, and the scientific gradations of shrimps, their sizes and their characters. This is the talk of Galveston, along the water. The handsome brick wharfhouses stand cooly in the fiery middays. He cannot but have admiration for the citizens of Galveston, he cannot help it, some of the older sailors find grievous fault with matters and detest the sodden heat, but Eneas with his youthful heart rejoices in the clamour of talk and business of remote concerns, and when he is perforce crawling up the coast to attend to the captain’s ambitions in Bermuda, or crossing the strange ruckled shallows of the Bay of Mexico to have truck and trade with the small Mexicans, he misses the simplicities and carefree sights of Galveston, and thinks of himself walking there, and greeting the shrimpers and, in the curious avenues, the easy sorts of people holding court on collapsing stoops.
     
    He is dreaming of Avenue 1½. Two nights distant from America. The sea again below. This time they are heading back for England. Bull Mottram the master gunner — they are carrying two guns into the filthy storms of mid-Atlantic in honour of the far-off war — well, Bull Mottram has regaled the tribe of the poop with a tale of Avenue 1½ that was mostly about a whore’s drawers, a whore’s conversation, and a whore’s treachery. It is not the whore that Eneas dreams of, but the Avenue itself, in its chambers of heat, the Negramen parading and calling. Negramen came out of Africa to Galveston nigh on three hundred years ago, big fancy princes of men he is informed, with gold on their arms and high ways, soon battered out of them. Or they came in like dead men, side by side in gigantic rows, stuffed in like herring, or the playing bones of herring in the very herring of a ship. And he knows his own uncle went from Sligo in a ship not so unlike that kind, or his father’s uncle it was maybe, in the days of hunger, and became a trooper in the Union Army, and wrote home many’s the time to say so, but precious little damn tin in the letters, according to Eneas’s mother. He wonders now in the giant pitch and toss of the new Atlantic whether he might have been best advised to go out there into wide America and find his great-uncle and upbraid him on that matter — or better, join him in his Indian or kindred adventures? Somewhere out there Trooper McNulty bears a face like his but older. Good luck to him! Good luck to the old fellow! He does not suppose in his heart that that man would be seen again ever on Sinbad’s Yellow Shore, that’s to say, Sligo herself.
    There is a deal in America that reminds him not so much of home itself, but the dreams and the stories of home. Yes, it was a drastically interesting place, falling away though it might be behind him. To think of the Negramen coming in, all those long centuries past, only to have their gold taken, and now their many generations living the life of Reilly or not as the case may be on Avenue 1½. He could have lived easily there himself, peacefully, strolling down to the flyblown store in the cool refuge of the time between sunlight and dark when the insects’ murderous thrumming dies away, and the piercing violin music of the night crickets begins. Hey ho , Charlie , and How’s it goin’, Emmanuel , for all them Negramen got their names out of the Bible, and best of all out of that Old Testament. And if they cannot find a name they like in the Old Testament, to all appearances, they will go forward to the Book of Revelation, that the second St John wrote in fever on an island. In a pitch-dark cave on an island in the pure realms of Greece, like an Irish poet of the old times.